Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/rebeccamwrites.bsky.social/post/3m6a62btty226
Here’s the dataset and their website if you are interested, there’s more games beyond Final Fantasy that they’ve looked at.
Main findings
- 35% of words were spoken by female characters.
- 29% of characters were female, which suggests the imbalance is driven by a lack of female characters.
- 94% of games had more male dialogue than female dialogue.
7 has absolutely beautiful hand rendered backgrounds, as do 8 and especially 9. The repetitive, tile based fields of 6 really don’t come close. Yes, the sprites are nicer in 6, but they’re just… Nothing. They’re irrelevant. There’s nothing in 6 that compares to climbing the graffiti covered wall leaving the slums, or the bizarre architecture of the city of the ancients, or even things like the golden saucer etc.
They both have the menu based gameplay which of course is great once you get the hang of it, and yes, 6 does better at the stuff pixel art really excels at. But 7 is set in a beautiful world, while 6 is set in a series of repetitive assemblages of tiles.